Joel Meyerowitz
«It’s (photography) me asking myself: ‘How interesting is this medium?
And how interesting can I make it for me? And, by the way, who the fuck am »
«No, not yet [smiling], and time is running out. But I’m getting»
Joel Meyerowitz is a renowned figure in colour street photography and an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. I saw some of his work in Berlin at Galerie Springer on August 28, 2014.
Born in New York in 1938, Joel Meyerowitz began his photography career in 1962 as a street photographer, inspired by the traditions of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. He primarily worked with two 35mm Leica for a long time, using black and white and colour film. As he became increasingly attracted to colour photography, he decided to experiment with different formats. Noticing that traditional methods were relatively slow, he contemplated, "Why not go all the way to 8x10 large format and take things really slow?"
Meyerowitz was among the early advocates for colour photography in the mid-1960s, playing a significant role in transforming the perception of colour photography from scepticism to widespread acceptance.
His first book, ‘Cape Light’, is considered a classic in colour photography and has sold over 150,000 copies over its 30-year lifespan. He has authored many other books, including ‘Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks’ (Aperture). In 2013, his 50-year retrospective book, ‘Taking My Time’, was published by Phaidon Press.
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His work exhibits a distinct vitality—vibrant, attentive, and generous. There is a sense that he is fully engaged and aware in his photography. His images reveal that the everyday world is filled with wonder when viewed from the right perspective. Meyerowitz expands on the ability of colour film to capture a broader sense of experiences in “real life.”
Joel Meyerowitz has shot alongside other legends such as Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones, and he even had a chance encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson on the streets.
I would have liked to have been able to interview him for Progressive Street, and instead of creating yet another critical analysis, I preferred to explore his many interviews and statements to interpret his work. I find his words to be thorough and revealing.
“I was overwhelmed. The streets, the intense flow of people, the light changing, the camera that I couldn’t quite get to work quickly enough. It just paralysed me. I had to learn to identify what it was exactly I was responding to, and if my response was any good. The only way to do that is to take pictures, print them, look hard at them and discuss them with other people.“
“One of the very first things I learned working on the street is when the moment arrives—you need to take a picture of the moment and often the frame itself isn’t a perfect frame. It isn’t a Cartier-Bresson classically organized frame. It has a different kind of energy in it—it is clumsier, bolder, it is more about the first strength of the connection of whatever is going on and your strength as an artist.”
“The thought for us [street photographers] was always: “How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant?” And, “Could we really make it live as art?” There was an almost moral dimension.”
“I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.”
“Why is it that the best poetry comes out of the most ordinary circumstances? You don’t have to have extreme beauty to write beautifully. You don’t have to have grand subject matter. I don’t need the Parthenon. This little dinky bungalow is my Parthenon. It has scale; it has color; it has presence; it is real: I’m not trying to work with grandeur. I’m trying to work with ordinariness. I’m trying to find what spirits me away. Ordinary things. – What did I say when I drove by those bungalows—something about the lives lived in them?”
“[The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy … The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation. … It transforms your way of looking at the world. First of all it is upside down, which is a whole other way of relating to things. And a wonderful way too because it sort of takes the content out of the context so now you are looking at it for something about the weights and the feelings. It’s not composition; it’s about how you know the push/pull of it. … Whereas with the Leica on the street the immediacy, the sense that something is actually happening and you are in the moment with it so that when you reach out with the camera, you are part of it and it disappears instantly. It’s the only instrument that stops things from disappearing. You can save them in that way. I learned, I think everything I know about being an artist, using a Leica on the streets. It taught me to understand human nature and to predict even the kinds of little things that might be happening. It has engaged my curiosity with the world and the meaning that comes out of the world. It’s really been an instrument of my education and development as an artist. That’s a mighty tool.”
“The 8 x 10 taught me reverence, patience, and meditation. It added another dimension to the scene, and the pictures are a product of two conditions, awareness and time. I had to modify my early discipline. Every artist’s growing process involves giving up something to get something else. You’re giving up your prejudices and preconceptions, and if you refuse to give those up then you don’t grow. You stay where you are.”
“I think [shooting with the 8×10] has changed me, for the better. I’ve noticed over the years (I’ve been shooting the view camera now for thirty-one years) and I’ve had many people say to me, in response to the view camera work, how Buddhist it is, how meditative it is, and often, if I’ve given a public lecture, someone will come to me afterwards and say, “are you a practicing Buddhist?” and I realize, in some ways, whatever has happened to me through using that camera, and its slowness, and the studied, reflective quality of it, has quieted me down.”
Foreword from Cape Light, conversational interviews with Bruce MacDonald, dean of the Museum School, July 22-26, 1977:
Bruce MacDonald: Why are you using color?
Meyerowitz: Because it describes more things.
Bruce MacDonald: What do you mean by description?
Meyerowitz: When I say description, I don’t only mean mere fact and the cold accounting of things in the frame. I really mean the sensation I get from things—their surface and color—my memory of them in other conditions as well as their connotative qualities. Color plays itself out along a richer band of feelings—more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation. I wanted to se more and experience more feelings from a photograph, and I wanted bigger images that would describe things more fully, more cohesively. Slow-speed color film provided that.
“The fact is that color film appears to be responsive to the full spectrum of visible light while black and white reduces the spectrum to a very narrow wavelength. This stimulates in the user of each material a different set of responses. A color photograph gives you a chance to study and remember how things look and feel in color. It enables you to have feelings along the full wavelength of the spectrum, to retrieve emotions that were perhaps bred in you from infancy—from the warmth and pinkness of your mother’s breast, the loving brown of you puppy’s face, and the friendly yellow of your pudding. Color is always part of experience. Grass is green, not gray; flesh is color, not gray. Black and white is a very cultivated response.”
“What is the art experience about? Really, I’m not interested in making “Art” at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word “Art”, it’s almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.” –
“I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it’s got lots of accounting going on in it–stones and buildings and trees and air – but that’s not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.”
“Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you’re alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there’s everything, next moment it’s gone. Photography is very philosophical.”
“’Tough’ meant it was an uncompromising image, something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn’t be described in any other way. So it was tough. Tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to understand. The tougher they were the more beautiful they became.”
“What are we all trying to get to in the making of anything? We’re trying to get to ourselves. What I want is more of my feelings and less of my thoughts. I want to be clear. I see the photograph as a chip of experience itself. It exists in the world. It is not a comment on the world. In a photograph you don’t look for, you look at! It’s close to the thing itself. It’s like an excitation. I want the experience that I am sensitive to to pass back into the world, fixed by chemistry and light to be reexamined. That’s what all photographs are about—looking at things hard. I want to find an instrument with the fidelity of its own technology to carry my feelings in a true, clear, and simple way. That’s how I want to think about less is more.”
All photos in this article are copyrighted by Joel Meyerowitz.
